Saturday, April 28, 2012

Non-profit in name only

My left-wing friends think that 'profit' is evil and that 'non-profit' organizations are good. Contemplate how much of a difference there is between the two as you read the TaxProf's description of how the president of a Massachusetts "non-profit" school is compensated.

It is a tiny school, with an enrollment the size of a modest elementary school. There is no campus, just a small office building. Its 400 part-time students are invisible here, attending classes at off-site facilities across the country. Yet the National Graduate School of Quality Management awarded its president, Robert J. Gee, $732,891 in compensation two years ago. ...

Gee has champagne tastes. In 2009, he persuaded the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency to authorize $2.64 million in low-interest bonds. That made possible his school’s purchase of a $3.25 million waterfront compound on Oyster Pond with spectacular views of Martha’s Vineyard, especially from the six-bedroom house earmarked to be Gee’s presidential residence. Five months later, the school, which focuses on a particular field of business management, purchased new automobiles to fit the estate setting: a silver Mercedes-Benz S550 sedan for Gee and a silver Mercedes-Benz station wagon for his wife, Aileen Waters Gee. The cost: $130,638, or about 2% of the school’s revenues that year. .

For years, the school’s revenues have financed a lavish lifestyle for Gee and for his wife, who has been paid at least $100,000 a year since 2003. And they have vacationed together at school expense: The school owns a deluxe winter getaway in the US Virgin Islands for their use, part of a 17-year employment contract that expires in 2023, when Gee will be 79.

Liberals want to believe that life is perfectible and that 'non-profits' and government agencies will somehow be free from foible. Conservatives, by contrast, accept that human nature is as it is.